Use of VIAF

I responded to a recent blog post on LibraryThing which mentioned restrictions on the use of VIAF and its relationship to the LC authority file.

In fact, VIAF is open for use by anyone.  Here's what I said about the use of VIAF:

VIAF is a project led by LC, the French and German national libraries and OCLC. There are no restrictions on its use. Dumps of the complete file are available, but need the approval of the project leaders.

VIAF is not designed to replace the LC/NACO authority file, but rather is built from it and a number of similar files.

I hope that is clear.  We really do want people to use VIAF!

--Th

 

Comments

[John Mark Ockerbloom]

Thank you; I'm very glad to hear this! I hope that a notice like this can also be put on viaf.org, or linked there, since the links from there now suggest a much less open policy.

I would also like to request a dump of the current file. I've got a number of things I could do with it, some along the lines of what I've done with id.loc.gov subjects.

Thanks!

[Ed Chamberlain]

Tom,
This is a great thing, any chance of an explicit license (i.e. CC0 data, PDDL) statement for the whole thing?

REPLY:
Yes there is. We are moving VIAF to an OCLC supported service and are working out the many details this entails, including licenses. Two we are looking at are Open Data Commons ODC-By and ODC-ODbL. If you have comments about the applicability of those we would be interested in hearing about them.
--Th